The Power of Testimony

DIKKON EBERHART
dangerous radiation. For a time, Lena showed improvement,
and the family returned to Austin. However, Lena’s recovery
was short lived, and she died in November 1921.
When Dad would tell this tale to my younger sister, Gretchen,
and me, he would use a tone that lent the tale a sense of awe and
of tragedy that endowed it with an almost Shakespearean aura—​
or at least it did for me. Of course, I was young, and I loved my
dad. In reality, though the tale is colorful enough, it is really just
an ordinary human tale of a business reversal coincident with a
parental death.
Dad’s journal entries from the period reflect the yearning he
felt for her recovery and, more vaguely, for the recovery of his
father’s fortunes. The entries are articulate beyond the ordinary,
even for a time when youngsters were more carefully schooled
in English composition than they are today. Emerging in Dad’s
journal is a passionate voice. Dad was already a writer of poetry,
but his journal marks the emergence of a powerful prose maker.
Many times, to me and to interviewers, Dad explained his
poetic determination in life as “my attempt to heal a bifurcated
and an inexorably anguished soul.” His soul may have been
bifurcated—​cut in half—​by the twin calamities which his family
encountered, but there was another element in Dad’s poetic
determination that was apparent to me. It was apparent to me
because I shared it. He was a Romantic. He believed in emotion
as the great doorway to intense aesthetic experience, such a high
level of experience that it closely touched the level of the divine.
1921. This is the time and these are the events that wounded
my father, and he barely adjusted to it. Once, he told me it wasn’t
until he was in his fifties that he finally began to recover from
the death of his mother. That’s a long, long burn.
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